EL PASO, Texas (KVIA)– Twenty-three hotels in El Paso owe the city more than $2.4 million in delinquent hotel occupancy taxes, according to a recent city audit.<\/p>\n
Hotel guests pay the occupancy tax at checkout, and hotels are required to forward a portion of that revenue to the city. The funds help promote tourism and support maintenance of the El Paso Convention Center. However, city leaders say collecting those payments has been an ongoing challenge.<\/p>\n
As of October, the amount owed is more than $2 million, City Rep. Lily Lim\u00f3n said, the missing money should be used for city needs.<\/p>\n
The audit shows that Reliance Global owns seven of the delinquent hotels and is responsible for more than half of the total owed. One property owes only $2.29 a detail that prompted Mayor Renard Johnson to question whether it was a typo.<\/p>\n
\u201cIs this a typo on the one? That\u2019s $2.29,\u201d Johnson said. \u201cAnd what kind of resources are we using to get $2.29? Not a typo, but we don\u2019t want to exclude anything from the report.\u201d<\/p>\n
To recover the overdue funds, the city has hired a law firm to send demand letters to hotel operators. Attorney Jos\u00e9 Padilla said businesses that continue refusing to pay could face court-ordered injunctions.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe consequence of not paying your delinquent hotel occupancy taxes is an injunction, meaning the court can order the hotel to be shut down,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
A city spokesperson told ABC-7 that several lawsuits have already been filed to force payment. Chief Financial Officer Robert Cortinas said the legal actions have helped.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a little bit lengthy to get that money back from these hotels, but the process does work,\u201d Cortinas said.<\/p>\n
Auditors said they have recovered more than $3 million in unpaid taxes since the audit effort began <\/p>\n
ABC-7 reached out to most of the hotel companies listed in the audit, including the one that owes the most. None responded. Some had no available contact information.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"EL PASO, Texas (KVIA)– Twenty-three hotels in El Paso owe the city more than $2.4 million in delinquent…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":58876,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[138,140,139],"class_list":["post-58875","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-el-paso","tag-el-paso","tag-el-paso-headlines","tag-el-paso-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58875","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58875"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58875\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/58876"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58875"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58875"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58875"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}